[OSI 007] The Boats - The Ballad Of The Eagle CD (Album) 2011

Banjo – Joseph Borreson
Cello, Saw – Danny Norbury
Electronics, Performer [Acoustics], Tape, Effects – Boats, The
Voice – Yasuhiko Fukuzono
This is for the ones we love.
OSI007 A Boats Achievements Book
There are now over 220 Boats titles covering a wide range of subjects and listening ages.
Comes in a handmade and hand-stamped cardboard envelope, and inside the CD in a slipcase.

Perfectly poised for autumnal gratification, The Boats present their
first new material in a while with new album 'The Ballad Of The Eagle'.
They're still a trio - Andrew Hargreaves, Craig Tattersall and Danny
Norbury - and ever refining their craft to a sort of ritual somnambulant
magic. For this outing they're also augmented by two special
contributions, Yasuhiko Fukuzono's vocals and Joseph Borreson's Banjo,
expanding their palette of electronic and acoustic instrumentation to a
(very) small orchestra's worth of rich and supernaturally spatialised
tones. Travelling through the album, that comforting sense of deepest
blue melancholia is omnipresent, but quite often slips beyond their
usual boundaries into out-and-out darkness. This mood sets the tone of
opener 'Invisible Orchestras' until a swooning cello resolution and the
spirit-raising machine-tooled miniature 'Dusty Rooms'. Here on in we
oscillate gently between tape-hiss enigmas 'If I May Trespass On Your
Patience', to quietly breathtaking, noirish drone-pop 'Omissions For You
To Fill In' with sterling vocal input from Yasuhiko and Danny Norbury's
Cello to the album centrepiece 'I Can't Read Your Morse Code
Heartbeat', a seductively dark piece of keys and sanguine strings
swaddled by electro-acoustic pulse patterns. The second half is
signalled by the matter-of-fact bleakness of 'I'm Not A Pessimist, I'm
Sad', and one of their most beautiful radiophonic techno pieces 'Chance
Meeting At Train Stations', concluding with the warbling,
edge-of-disintegration keys, drawn strings and tape hiss in 'The Days We
Didn't Spend'.